Saturday, December 20, 2014

Judge in Maryland Locks Up Youths and Rules Their Lives - NYTimes.com

Herman C. Dawson "tough love" Maryland judge

Judge in Maryland Locks Up Youths and Rules Their Lives - NYTimes.com
by Erica Goode
[The general trend is to lower incarceration and charging of juveniles - because crime rates are down and Americans are coming to realize that it is a national disgrace that we incarcerate people at a rate far in excess of the rest of the world. Mainly Black and Latin men. But some "tough guys" are holdouts.]Judge Herman C. Dawson is an example. Presiding in Courtroom D-15 of the mammoth county courthouse here over cases that range from shoplifting to armed robbery, he has won a reputation as a jurist who brooks no excuses and involves himself deeply in the lives of the teenagers who come before him.

Raised by a single mother in the segregated South, he subscribes to a “tough love” philosophy that venerates hard work, education and personal responsibility as the antidotes to poverty, negative peer pressure, chaotic parenting and other forces that can tip children into delinquency.

ContinThe juveniles who end up in his courtroom, Judge Dawson says, have often been allowed to run wild without consequences. “People have made too many excuses for them, and they end up believing it,” he said in a recent interview.